A major issue facing retailers today is theft. According to some estimates, theft of retail goods costs retailers up to billions of dollars every year.
One type of retail theft is called barcode-swapping. In this type of theft, a thief legally purchases a relative cheap product and removes the barcode. The thief then returns to the store and replaces a barcode on a more expensive product with the cheaper product barcode. When the thief goes to pay for the more expensive product, the scanner picks up the cheaper barcode and the theft is the discount between the two products.
In order to attempt to prevent barcode-swapping, retailers have used a variety of measures. One example is that retailers have resorted to using checkout clerks to eyeball the product as it comes across the scanner. Additionally, retailers have required guests to present a receipt at the door, where a security person compares the receipt to the purchased items. Finally, retailers have tried using humans to identify interesting aspects of a design of a product to check for barcode-swapping. With the rise of self-service terminals, solutions involving human verification cannot keep up with technology advances. Finally, the current solutions have shortcomings in speed, cost, or reliability or undesirably rely on human inputs or verifications.